It was one of the Bay Area’s most trusted banks. Now some consumer advocates question its lending practices in certain East Bay neighborhoods.

The bank was World Savings, bought by Wachovia in mid-2006. They were a popular lender. But now some advocates want to know why so many of their loans were made in some of Oakland’s low-income minority neighborhoods.

“It’s very frightening, it’s upsetting,” said Annie McKenzie.

“Our neighborhoods are becoming blight because of all the foreclosures,” said Diane Busby.

Welcome to zip code 94621, where homes are going vacant and residents are uneasy.

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Gov. Charlie Crist has signed new insurance legislation that extends a rate freeze for more than a million customers of state-backed Citizens Insurance.

However, Crist vetoed a part of the measure Wednesday that would have provided $250 million in incentives for private insurers willing to get into Florida’s dicey homeowners’ market.

The bill fixes the insurance measure passed in a January 2007 special session, but does little to take the risk off Florida citizens if a major hurricane strikes a heavily populated area.

The bill gives the state more authority over private companies, but residents with car insurance or homeowner policies would be assessed if a catastrophic storm hit Florida and the state was unable to meet its financial obligations.

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Wall Street credit markets are still sluggish and skittish, and questions still hang over mortgage lending in the public mind, but refinancing mortgage and consumer debt still is not only possible but remains a good way to get ahead, lenders and borrowers say.

Getting a lower interest rate on home debt, reducing a monthly house payment, consolidating debt, getting cash out of home equity for a special purpose - all are still available to homeowners with some equity in their home.

Having “good” credit helps, but even that isn’t always necessary, to hear Shawn Mason tell it.

The Moore man refinanced the loan on his home, a 1,410-square-foot house built in 1968, specifically to get his credit back in shape following bankruptcy.

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When Jenny and John Crowley learned they were having a baby, they did the responsible thing: they bought life insurance.

Barely in their 30s, they passed the insurance company’s physicals, applied for a $500,000 policy for Jenny and a $1 million policy for John, and thought they wouldn’t have to worry about it for decades.

The Savings Bank Life Insurance Co. of Massachusetts was so taken with the Crowleys, the company used a photograph of their newborn daughter swaddled in a yellow blanket on the cover of one of its brochures.

Just one year later, Jenny was dead of an aggressive form of breast cancer, and when John tried to start his life anew as a single father, SBLI rejected his claim for it to pay his wife’s policy. The company claimed that even though doctors said Jenny was healthy, she must have been sick before they agreed to insure her.

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Consumer home-buying intentions in the Toronto area have dropped sharply this year, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. report.

About 6 per cent of households in the Toronto area intend to buy a home this year, down from 9 per cent in 2007, the federal housing agency said yesterday.

“With the cost of buying a home moving upward, some people are re-evaluating their home-buying decision,” said CMHC analyst Jason Mercer in an interview.

Among potential first-time buyers, who have been a key driver in Toronto, buying intentions have also cooled. The report says 40 per cent want to buy this year, compared to 47 per cent last year, taking some additional steam out of the market.

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A committee vote in Congress doesn’t provide much comfort to families staring down foreclosure, but the Senate Banking Committee approved a bill Tuesday that could set the framework for the federal government’s answer to the housing-market mess.

The bill - a bipartisan compromise that passed Sen. Chris Dodd’s committee in a 19-2 vote - could break a deadlock in Congress and among Bush administration officials on the foreclosure crisis that is affecting millions of American homeowners.

Under the bill, the Federal Housing Administration would back as much as $300 billion in new mortgages, allowing lenders to refinance the most threatened home loans. The cost of failed loans would be covered not by taxpayers but by fees paid by mortgage originators to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally chartered companies that buy mortgages from banks and other lenders.

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Vinny DeMarco is head of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative. Here is his letter to the editor in yesterday’s paper responding to my blog pointing out that a new law requiring health coverage to age 25 for dependents doesn’t apply to most Maryland families.

Although Jay Hancock’s column “New health mandate less than mandatory” (May 11) correctly points out some of the limits of Maryland’s new law expanding health coverage for young adults, he greatly understates the law’s potential.

As of Jan. 1, Maryland became one of only a handful of states to allow young people up to age 25, whether they are in college or not, to stay on their parents’ health care insurance if they remain dependents.

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A Des Moines real estate investor accused of consumer fraud has been banned from doing business in Iowa.

A Polk County District Court judge on Monday ordered John Davis to stop selling, renting, leasing or investing in real estate in Iowa.

The order resolves a consumer fraud lawsuit filed by the Iowa attorney general’s office against Davis and his companies in 2006.

Davis, who agreed to the terms of the order, also was ordered to pay $30,000 to reimburse consumers.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller says the lawsuit alleged that Davis sold homes at highly inflated prices to customers with average or below average credit scores. He says Davis also used phantom down payments to help customers get mortgages.

Miller says all the loans cited in the lawsuit ended in foreclosure.

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Criticism of the mortgage bill passed last week by the House focused on prospects for federal money potentially helping to bail out speculators or some overextended borrowers who put themselves at risk.

But the bill is less risky to taxpayers than its critics claim, requiring substantial new accountability by affected borrowers and lenders alike. And it also goes much farther than simply bailing out borrowers at risk of foreclosure, by substantially reforming regulation of the Federal Housing Administration and the two big government-sponsored enterprises that finance mortgages, known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Prior to the vote last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had endorsed the bill’s approach, while not endorsing any particular legislation.

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BRISTOL, Tenn. - Marketed through television advertisements featuring senior celebrities like Pat Boone, Robert Wagner and James Garner, reverse mortgages are becoming more and more popular across the nation.

But it is difficult to find local people who have chosen a reverse mortgage as an answer to their financial needs because their sense of pride keeps them from speaking publicly about it.

“They’re still very private,” said Joan Dawson, a reverse mortgage specialist with Wells Fargo’s Johnson City, Tenn., branch. “They feel they weren’t able to make ends meet with the funds they had.”

Such mortgages are looked down upon by people like retired Bristol Tennessee resident Robert Latham, who doesn’t think the financial arrangement is all it claims to be.

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